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Traffic citations are going high-tech in Muskogee.

Those receiving traffic citations in the city may soon be receiving a Digi-Ticket — a ticket printed on-site by a hand-held device.

The person receiving the ticket has to sign it, much like people receiving UPS deliveries now sign an electronic, hand-held device, said Police Capt. Chad Farmer.

The traffic officer who initiates the ticket goes to the station at the end of his shift and puts every ticket distributed that day into a central computer, Farmer said.

Anyone recently getting a warning instead of a traffic citation from the Oklahoma Highway Patrol in Muskogee and surrounding counties probably has received a similar ticket from the Mobile Cop program.

Those warning tickets are generated from a computer inside the troopers’ cruisers, said OHP Lt. Gary Isbell.

Farmer said the system to be in use soon by Muskogee traffic police cuts the time to write a ticket in half — from about 15 minutes to seven minutes.

“You can get back on the street quicker.”

The program will go into effect as soon as an interface is programmed into the local computer system at the Muskogee Police Station. That will be done by the vendor the department uses for current records management, Farmer said.

The traffic unit will start with four units to get the program going.

“Then, we’ll start buying more as we go along,” Farmer said. “It costs $28,000 up front to get the program going.”

A similar Mobile Cop program for Troop C of the OHP station in Muskogee will be fed into a server in the Oklahoma County Sheriff’s Office, said Trooper Scott Miller of Troop C.

Each trooper using the program will have a computer mounted in the front seat of their patrol unit, he said.

In addition to automatically spitting out a ticket, the computer has additional programs that alert troopers to wanted people in the vicinity and other information.

There is a place on the computer to swipe the driver’s license of the person stopped. Coded information on that license appears, as well as a person’s traffic record, Miller said.

It confirms whether the person has valid insurance and whether their license is suspended. If the person stopped has an arrest warrant pending, that, too, is revealed to the trooper.

A cryptic message inquires if the person being checked on who has a warrant is with the officer. If the person is with the officer, a signal to put the person in handcuffs is sent to the trooper.

“It won’t tell you anything else until the person is handcuffed,” Miller said.

The tickets are digitally transferred on thermal paper, which uses no ink, so it saves money. Pressure on the thermal paper “prints” the ticket.

If the person isn’t wanted, a trooper will have discretion whether to write a ticket or a warning, Miller said.

Court and prison records also are accessible from the computers.

The program is expected to save from $20,000 to $30,000 a year on the cost of tickets, he said.

Tickets that are citations have a hard ticket for the driver and three other copies, one for the Department of Public Safety and two to county court clerks in the county in which the ticket was written, Miller said.

At present, a trooper sends tickets he writes outside the county by mail to county court clerks. That will all go away as the system changes to the Mobile Cop tickets.

Isbell said when all court clerks across the state get the program, citations will be by the Mobile Cop program.

The state budget problem may delay that, Miller said. OHP is hoping the program is in use this fall, he said.